This was something new, a phenomenon for which there was no name.
Galileo saw that the small “stars” surrounding Jupiter were MOVING, following Jupiter in the sky and, furthermore, shifting in their relative locations. They were orbiting Jupiter. Jupiter had objects of its own that were like the earth’s moon!
“Moon”, at that time, was a term that specifically meant THE Moon, the one and only. Galileo did not, in fact originally refer to them as “moons”; in his first distributed description of his discovery, he called them “Medicean stars” (allegedly hoping this would please the powerful de Medici family).
That term didn’t stick. From our vantage point, it’s easy to see that calling them “stars” was a poor long-range choice, as they aren’t stars and don’t have much in common with stars aside from being points of light in the sky. And yet, even so, the rocky little objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter are still called “asteroids”, which is almost as much of a misnomer, so it’s possible that “Medicean stars” could have hung on as the new term.
We could have given them entirely new names, of course, without repurposing any existing terms (with or without modifiers like “Medicean”). Or we could have said they were objects that were LIKE the Moon, although that doesn’t give them a name.
We call them “moons”. The original understanding of the word “moon” was modified, expanded from referencing only the ghostly galleon that illuminates the earthly sky so as to include these similar bodies that orbit other planets.
As you’ll recall from your English homework, calling the Moon a “ghostly galleon” is “using a metaphor”. Calling the objects orbiting Jupiter “stars” is also a sort of metaphor, and in the context where “Moon” specifically meant our moon, calling them “moons” is an application of language use that is cousin to the metaphor. Our own moon is not literally a galleon (or ghostly) nor are the objects orbiting Jupiter literally stars; our moon is also not identically the same thing as the moon that folks in Galileo’s time already knew, and to some people it might have seemed wrong to extend the meaning of “moon” to the new objects.
The success of a literary metaphor depends on the reader’s or audience’s tendency to embrace the compelling significance of what the compared items have in common. There’s always a certain tension between the “wrongness” of asserting an identity that the object doesn’t quite literally have, on the one hand, and the “rightness” of the observed similarity that makes us nod in recognition.
Successfully expanding the definition of a word–like “moon” to embrace the new Galilean objects–also involves a tension between the fact that the word’s original meaning did not include them versus the compelling similarities that makes such an expanded use resonate with us as sensible and appropriate.
Stating, on the other hand, that the Galilean objects surrounding Jupiter are like the Moon is “using a simile”. A simile avoids that tension; it doesn’t have that level on which it is using a word to mean something beyond the zone in which it has been applied before. Linguistically, it is a weaker formulation, because it comes with an implicit “except for”, a gesture towards the dissimilarities that may exist whether they are specifically laid out or not.
Suppose a feminine male person chooses to say “I am LIKE a girl” or “I am LIKE one of the women”. It is, on the one hand, a formulation less likely to provoke a response of “No you’re not” than the statements “I am one of the women” or “I’m a girl”. On the other hand, it’s weaker; hovering around it is an invisible codicil that says “except for these ways in which I’m not”. And it also doesn’t give a name to the speaker of the statement.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t used it, myself. In fact I’ve often said something to the effect of “I am a male who is like a girl or woman except for having a male body”. And because that doesn’t provide an identity-name (because, as I said, similes don’t), I’ve called myself various NEW things like “invert” or attempted to seize on other existing terms like “sissy”. But at a certain point in my life, a partner of mine listened at great length to my descriptions and my backstory and she nodded and said “Oh, I get it, you’re a girl!”
I liked it. It had a definite “cut to the chase” directness to it and it emphasized exactly the connection I wanted people to realize in their heads.
I do get those “no you’re not” responses from people. There are a lot of folks who resist the expanded word use, the claimed identity–some because they only consider people born female with XX chromosomes to be girls & women, some because they only consider people who are morphologically female to be girls & women, and some because they only consider people who represent themselves to other people as physically female to be girls & women.
Such attitudes are not exactly uncommon. Check out these opinions, in which folks reject anything other than a “two genders maximum” world, even among some who accept the validity of transgender people.
On the other side of things–our side of this argument–there is a lot of resentment among gender atypical, nonbinary, etc people about having our identities refused, our self-definitions rejected. I’m familiar with that firsthand: when someone does the “no you’re not” thing in response to my self-identification, yeah, it’s intrusively arrogant and sure as hell not reassuring when they attempt to explain to me who I am instead. But the goal, for me, isn’t really to get everyone to use my terminology. Well, OK, I do recognize that appearances may be to the contrary… I do have some ego investment and a fondness for the order and pattern I choose, so yeah I PREFER that folks use my terminology! It makes me angry when they refuse to! But even so, I’ll say it again: my primary goal isn’t to get everyone to use my terminology.
In your schema, in your way of seeing the world and categorizing things and so on, maybe my maleness is of more categorical importance to you than my femininity. If you prefer to conceptualize me as a “guy who is like a girl” in ways other than the physical, I don’t reject that formulation, even though I resent being contradicted. I suppose we do all tend to altercast other people within the privacy of our own heads, categorizing them into the identities we perceive them as.
But do not say I am just a guy who is like a girl. Do not say I am merely a male who has feminine characteristics. There’s no “just” or “merely” about it. In stating my identity I am making a big deal of it and saying this is a Difference, something that sets me and my experience apart. On that one, do me the courtesy of not rejecting that claim, at least not until you’ve taken time to hear my story.
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This a reposted blog post. Cleared with the moderators in advance.
More seriously, though, I don’t see gender as black and white (or boy and girl) any longer. I realize that there’s a million shades of grey between those two (seemingly) well-defined terms.